Deborah Salem’s Blog

Gwendolyn and Cecily and their inverted roles

If we think about the main questions discussed in the play “The importance of Being Earnest” we will see that one of the most common is the notion of inversion. And all the major characters of the play incorporate this characteristic. The female characters who represented that very well are Gwendolyn and Cecily.

Gwendolen suggests the qualities of conventional Victorian womanhood more than any other female character in the play. She is very artificial and pretentious. Gwendolen is in love with Jack and her main preoccupation is to marry to someone “earnest”, like Jack is known by her. This preoccupation of marriage with a person who have virtue and honor is crucial in Victorian middle- and upper-middle classes.

On the contrary, Cecily is a girl of nature. She is ingenuous and unspoiled. However, her ingenuity is covered by fantasy. She is obsessed with the name Earnest  just as Gwendolen is, and she falls in love with “Uncle Jack’s brother” who invented that his name is also “Earnest”.

Before we discuss about the inverted roles of these two characters it is important to know about the rules of a marriage in the Victorian Age.

One of these rules is that the man has to propose the marriage for the woman and he has to prove that he can support his new bride in the lifestyle she was accustomed to. In the play “The importance of Being Earnest” the things change place. The women, Gwendolen and Cecily are the providers of their marriage. They are not Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff the protagonists of all the marriage arrangements but Gwendolen and Cecily are. They practically lead the men to propose marriages to them, despite the men are also interesting in it.

Let’s observe how the Gwendolen’s marriage proposal happens:

Another important rule of a marriage in the Victorian Age is that the woman’s father was responsible for retaining a “jointure” for his daughter and arrange a good husband to her.

In the case of Gwendolen’s marriage Lady Bracknell, her mother, usurps the role of the father in interviewing Jack, since typically this was a father’s task. Here, there is another change of gender roles in the play:

About Cecily, the situation is very similar to the Gwendolen. She is a fantasist girl. She has invented her romance with Ernest and elaborated it with as much as fantasy is possible, even the fights and endings along the invented romance:

Returning to the marriage rules of the Victorian Age, it is interesting to remember that any failure to follow these rules of conduct meant a ruined reputation for the woman. An honorable man would not become engaged to a woman who would disobey societal rules. In the play, we can affirm that Gwendolen and Cecily break gender roles as the marriage is concerned. They take charge of their own romantic lives, while the men stand by watching in a relatively passive role. And in the Victorian age their role must be assumed by the men.

In fact, Wilde makes fun of the whole Victorian idea of morality as a rigid body of rules about what people should and shouldn’t do. He shows like people can act in different and inverted ways.

According to Oxford dictionary, symbols are objects, characters, figures, and colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts. The play, The Glass Menagerie, in general, is full of symbols, as the title of the play: the glass menagerie, a collection of animals made of glass. The symbol ‘blue roses’ appears at he first time in Scene two as an image projected in the screen. This image announces the apparition of the character Laura, who becomes visible after the screen goes out.

Looking at the dictionary of symbols *, the color ‘blue’ is most often associated with issues of the spirit and intellect. It is the color of the sky, heaven and water. For this reason it can have feminine, cool, and reflective qualities. Blue may be truth and transparency and it is linked to loyalty, fidelity, constancy, and chastity. On the other hand, if we look at the word ‘roses’ we will find a mean related to the color ‘red’. The roses represent a symbol of love, passion and blood. However roses also may represent purity and grace. If we analyze the symbol ‘blue roses’, we can say that at the same time it represents something lovely and full of grace, it is something fragile and weak.

Returning to the context of the history, ‘blue roses’ is the nickname attributed to Laura by Jim. He is a high school student who upon asking about her absence she answered: ‘pleurosis’, and mistakenly he hears her say ‘blue roses’ and carelessly adopts the moniker for her. The most interesting thing is that the nickname is totally related to her personality. As I said before, ‘roses’ remains something is red, however in the play, Laura is not called by ‘red roses’, but by ‘blue roses’ and she is called by this because she is not strong like the color red, in the contrast she is fragile, including her physical appearance:

Laura [in a tone of frightened]: I’m crippled! (Scene 2)

Laura is a person who can not handle stress. She cannot deal with pressure. We can see this when she abandons the Business College because her impossibility to do the typing test:

Amanda: (…) And she said, “No – I remember her perfectly now. Her hands shook so that she couldn’t hit the right keys! The first time we gave a speed test, she broke down completely – was sick at the stomach and almost had to be carried into the wash room! After that morning she never showed up any more. We phoned the house but never got any answer” (…) (Scene 2)

So, we can see that Laura cannot deal with embarrassing situations and when she is like that, she always look for her glass animals. Because this, Laura can be compared to her collection of glass animal. Like the figurines, Laura is delicate, fanciful, and somehow old-fashioned. Glass is transparent, like the color blue, but, when light is shined upon it correctly, it refracts an entire rainbow of colors. This also happens when the sunshine touch the water (we can attribute it to the color blue), the true beauty is revealed. Similarly, Laura, though quiet and bland around strangers, is a source of strange, multifaceted delight to those who choose to look at her in the right light.

Furthermore, Jim, the boy who used the nickname ‘blue rose’ to nominated Laura, is not a deep person. He is a high school hero and he does not have anything valuable to be considered. He is totally superficial. He is a boy who can only see the external beauty. So, he is not a person that looks Laura inside. To him, Laura can be just a ‘blue rose’, but to the eyes of a person who comprehends her interior, she can be a bright ‘blue rose’!

* http://www.umich.edu/~umfandsf/symbolismproject/symbolism.html/

To refer to Lady Macbeth is to think of someone who is dark is also sublime.

Lady Macbeth is a noble woman and also respected, like Macbeth is. King Duncan calls her “our honored hostess”. She loves her husband and he loves her too, we can see that as he calls her “my dearest love”. However, at the same time she is very ambitious, as shown by her immediate determination for Macbeth to be king. This outcome will benefit her and her husband equally. She immediately concludes that “the fastest way” for Macbeth to become king is by murdering King Duncan.

Lady Macbeth knows her husband well. She thinks he may be too kind in order to murder King Duncan. This is why she represses her conscience so she can later usher Macbeth into committing the deed. At first Macbeth agrees. But later Macbeth wavers in his decision. But Lady Macbeth is sure that being king is what Macbeth really wants and that this is the best for both of them. So, in response to Macbeth’s uncertainty, Lady Macbeth manipulates him by questioning his manhood and his love for her.

As we can see, Lady Macbeth contests, all the time, the courageous of Macbeth, calling him a coward who for a moment wants to kill the king, and sometimes not:  “’I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would’”.

As the play takes place, it becomes clear that Lady Macbeth’s thoughts make her appear as irreligiously, cold and ambitious, but this is not so. To prepare for what she feels must be done she calls on evil spirits to “stop up th’ access and passage to remorse” in order to be relentless. Otherwise her conscience would not allow her to act. She makes an evil prophecy to herself. In general, every woman desires to be a mother, but she lets go of that desire in order to become a queen.

In order to make real her desire to become a queen, Lady Macbeth does not measure the impact and consequences that this crime, to kill a king, can cause. An important aspect of her that it can be mentioned is that she does not seem to have a clear idea of what the murder will do to her. She is not aware of what is to break a taboo, whereas Macbeth seems to know. She only thinks of to be the queen and we can see it clearly in her speech:

We can see that Lady Macbeth tries to hide the feeling of being guilty for the king’s murder. She thinks that it is better not think about the act, like this she keeps her conscience in free.

However, her apparent “innocence” about to know what kill a king means, not makes her free of the guilt of the crime. If we review the murder of Duncan, (Act II sc ii) you can see how malevolent, ruthless and callous a person she truly is. She does not have courage to kill the king, as she says:  “Had he not resembled / My father as he slept, I had done’t”, but she is successful because regardless of his own conscience Macbeth carries out their plan of murder. However, we have to consider that after Macbeth commits the crime, she goes back to the murder scene and cleverly smears the grooms with Duncan’s blood.

In that moment, she also assumes the guilt of the murder; she takes the daggers and dirty her hands with the same blood from the hands of Macbeth:

Just in the Act V, she pays of what she did. Lady Macbeth starts to have a strange habit of sleepwalking. She seems to see blood on her hands and claims that nothing will ever wash it off. She descends to madness until to die.

Lady Macbeth is not less guilty than Macbeth in the murder of the king because her “apparent innocence” or because she did not accomplish the act of kill. Remember that her hands were covered in blood as Macbeth’s hands. Therefore, she and her husband keep the same crime:  a secret and cold blooded murder of a King (Duncan), in which they are both responsible. In my opinion, she can be even more guilt than Macbeth because she holds the weight of the burden, because the murder was HER idea.

Is Lady Macbeth as guilty as Macbeth in the murder of the King? Comment and explain your answer.

To Counter Malthus

First of all, the title of the poem appoints what will be said in the whole poem. Margaret Avison, a contemporary poet, counters the Malthus’ idea in a wonderful way.  In the analysis of the Avison’s poem below we can see some of Malthus’ arguments being criticized.

None us in this so

burdened earth has known

how to live, let alone

who is too many.

In this first verse, Margaret Avison says there is not a rule to be followed to live. None of us can teach how to live. To complement this idea, the author uses a punctuation mark, a comma, and adds that people have to be treated as individual humans, that think in different ways and live different lives. In a contrary way, Malthus studied people like a “mass”, the individually feelings and lives are ignored.

Presence, each day

afresh, you give a

purifying signal to

sting us alive.

Here, I believe that principal word is “presence”. Again, the author criticizes the Malthus’s idea, which defends that the only way to avoid the poverty is to control the population growth which is limited by increased mortality and for all restrictions on the birth. To counter this, the poet says that presence is an important signal that encourages us to live. I imagine Margaret saying to Malthus: “How will we have pleasure in living if we are worried in to exterminate it?”

Vast territories and seashores

still bear these thronging

strangers. May none die

without somebody caring.

Now in this verse, there is a contrast between the first sentence and the second. In the first sentence the poet emphasizes that people who are treated by strangers continue to live in vast territories and seashores, she shows that is abundance in the earth. But in the second sentence, the lack is emphasized. The lack of care makes these people die. It does not enough have abundance of land and sea if the people are not seen. These strangers, that the poet mentions, are not seen as human beings; they belong to the marginalized part of society and as such comprise a group that does not contribute to the Capitalism. They live in areas like: Africa, Middle East and some countries of Latin America. I remember a fact that exactly shows this contrast in the world: The campaigns of contraceptives in countries of Africa. We know that these campaigns kill the pregnant women and their babies. But, the government “close the eyes” to this situation and hide it to the population who are victims of this. I reflect: “Shall we agree with the idea of Malthus?, because these campaigns is defending his idea: to exterminate the poverty. So, this fact demonstrates the contrast that the poet presents in this verse and she claims for changing, we can do this in a different way.

To know even one other is

costly. And being known.

Alive, among so many

more now? a concern…

In the first period of this verse, the poet says that to maintain a relationship with other people is costly. How this issue involve money, people prefer, as I said before, to choose the cheaper way, like the campaign of contraceptives in Africa. The second sentence And being known, shows that if people know each other will cause many problems that we can observe in the next sentences. The question: Alive, among so many more now?, presents that it is so difficult to live in our societies, imagine with different people. I believe that the poet says that people are not prepared to leave their pre-concepts and face to the poverty of other countries. In the last sentence, a concern…, we can see that preoccupations about this fact is innumerable, to represent this poet uses the “dots”. People are worried how to care of these people and how to feed them and forgot that we can live together if we share what we have.

Hunger makes men desperate, threatens

to congeal the quandary. Yet

Presence abides untouched

in the churn of Quantity.

In the last verse, the poet implicitly criticizes the Malthus’s idea that defends that uncontrolled growth would result in a lack of resources food for the population as a consequence generating hunger. In a contrast way, the poet says that hunger just exist because people do not help each other. She uses the word quandary, to show the dilemma among people who have what to eat and people do not have, because this population is in a miserable condition. The poet concludes her idea in the second period, illustrating that there is a huge quantity of people in the earth but there not presence among them. The word Presence can be means the presence of God, only this presence can be solve the marginalization and poverty in the world.

None us in this so

burdened earth has known

how to live, let alone

who is too many.

Presence, each day

afresh, you give a

purifying signal to

sting us alive.

Vast territories and seashores

still bear these thronging

strangers. May none die

without somebody caring.

To know even one other is

costly. And being known.

Alive, among so many

more now? a concern…

Hunger makes men desperate, threatens

to congeal the quandary. Yet

Presence abides untouched

in the churn of Quantity.

A Thunderstorm – Iambic pentameter

-   /   -         /   -         /    -     /    -    /  

A moment the wild swallows like a flight

  -    /      -       /        -       /        -      /  -    /  

Of withered gust-caught leaves, serenely high,

  -     /   -       /     -     /    -      /     -       /  

Toss in the windrack up the muttering sky

  -     /          -        /    -     /    -       /        -    /  

The leaves hang still. Above the weird twilight

Rhyme scheme: abbaaccadeffde

A Thunderstorm – An Analysis

“A moment the wild swallows like a flight”

The first line of this poem shows the moment before the thunderstorm. We can see that in this moment the birds, wild swallows fly over the sky with the movement of the wind. This movement indicates that a thunderstorm is coming soon.

“Of withered gust-caught leaves, serenely high,”

In this second line, the poet uses a metaphor to compare the swallows with the leaves. This metaphor, “Of withered gust-caught leaves”, implies that the swallows fly like the leaves. Consequently, these leaves are dry and wither to fly so high.

“Toss in the windrack up the muttering sky.”

Now, the poet writes about the sound that this thunderstorm leads. It seems that the storm which comes is a strong and loud storm. The expression “muttering sky” implies a sound of the wind and the thunders over the sky. We can imagine bolts of lightning and sudden gusts of wind accompanied the violent rain. This action denotes that this moment becomes dark and shadowy.

“The leaves hang still. Above the weird twilight,”

In this line, the poet shows that in spite of the gusts of the wind and the thunders, the leaves still hang on the trees. The expression “weird twilight” shows that the thunderstorm is happening when sunsets. The sky incorporates a red color and the horizon becomes darker until the sun goes down.

“The hurrying centres of the storm unite”

Now, we can see the sky becoming dark, this occurs because the clouds gather and we can imagine the sound of the storm with its whole strength getting over the land.

“And spreading with huge trunk and rolling fringe,”

In this line, the rain unites some elements of the nature, like “huge trunk” and “rolling fringe”. These elements denote the sense of vision and we can see all elements of the nature reach to arrive the storm.

“Each wheeled upon its own tremendous hinge,”

The poet continues describing the movements that happen in the sky before the storm falls in the earth and assume this process of a huge storm. The words “wheeled” and “hinge” shows clearly these movements.

“Tower darkening on. And now from heaven’s height,”

“And now…” the storm hits the earth. The storm starts to fall. This line shows that the rain becomes real. The storm towers above the sky and this action becomes the sky dark because the rain invades it. Let’s see what the poet says about what is coming from “heaven’s height” in the next lines.

“With the long roar of elm-trees swept and swayed,”

In this line, the poet describes the sound of the wind “sweeping” and swaying” the trees with a “long road”. Now, we can see what happen with the elements of the nature, like the trees, when the storm is falling. The sense of the sound is showed so deeply, that we can hear the sound of the wind in the branches and leaves of the trees.

“And pelted waters, on the vanished plain”

The poet continues describing the image of the storm. Now we can see waters of the rain sliding down over the plains and we can hear the sound of the water pelting the land. The poet lose sight of the plains, maybe because the strong storm. Because this the plains become vanished.

“Plunges the blast. Behind the wild white flash”

Now we know what comes from the “heaven’s height”. Lights, probably thunders over the sky. These lights, as mentioned in the poem, are white and seem flashes in the sky. This action shows the explosion of the thunderstorm, the sky becomes white and the nature wild and violent. The sense demonstrated here is the sight; As I said before, we can see clearly the color of the lights in the sky.

“That splits abroad the pealing thunder-crash,”

The sound of the thunders in the sky becomes loudly and extends around the whole land. The thunders sounds invade the sky.

“Over bleared fields and gardens disarrayed,”

In this line, we can see the result of the thunderstorm. The fields are “bleared” and the gardens are “disarrayed”. This is the disorder caused by the thunderstorm. The sense here is sight, like a picture we can imagine the fields and the gardens described by the poet.

“Column on column comes the drenching rain.”

Finally, the storm acquires a static form. The rain falls down in the land and poet shows this clearly, “column by column”, until the end of the thunderstorm.

A moment the wild swallows like a flight
Of withered gust-caught leaves, serenely high,
Toss in the windrack up the muttering sky.
The leaves hang still. Above the weird twilight,
The hurrying centres of the storm unite
And spreading with huge trunk and rolling fringe,
Each wheeled upon its own tremendous hinge,
Tower darkening on. And now from heaven’s height,
With the long roar of elm-trees swept and swayed,
And pelted waters, on the vanished plain
Plunges the blast. Behind the wild white flash
That splits abroad the pealing thunder-crash,
Over bleared fields and gardens disarrayed,
Column on column comes the drenching rain.

We know that Wales has a tumultuous and somewhat violent history. The Welsh were greatly affected by the continuous invasions by many countries and cultures. Wales was affected both negatively and positively by these invasions.

In the poem Welsh History, R. S. Thomas shows these two kinds of past lived by welsh people, the positive and the negative pasts:

            “We were a people taut for war; the hills

            Were no harder, the thin grass

            Clothed them more warmly than the coarse

            Shirts our small bones.”

In this first part, the poetic voice says that welsh lived in a warm and comfortable place. This is the positive side of welsh past.

             “We fought, and were always in retreat,”

In this line, we can understand that welsh were warriors, but not always they were victorious. In many moments of their history, the invaders explored their land and the welsh had to leave and abandon their own land to the enemies occupy it.

            “Our kings died, or they were slain

            By the old treachery at the ford.

            Our bards perished, driven from the halls

            Of nobles by the thorn and bramble.

            We were a people bred on legends,

            Warming our hands at the red past.”

Now, the poetic voice shows the negative side of welsh past. Although, they fought like warriors, there were many deaths, the honor of kings was destroyed and the welsh lived a “red past”, that is a past full of blood and tragedies.

“The great were ashamed of our loose rags

Clinging stubbornly to the proud tree

Of blood and birth, our lean bellies

And mud houses were a proof

Of our ineptitude for life.”

“We were a people wasting ourselves
in fruitless battles for our masters”;

In this seven lines, the poet continues saying that the welsh past was not totally glorious. Their recent past was ashamed; this expression “loose rags” shows that they felt the pain of loose so many people in “fruitless battles”. Their “lean bellies” and “mud houses” are a signal of their “ineptitude for life”.

            “We were a people, and are so yet.”

In this line, the poetic voice says that welsh people already live the past in their present lives. Welsh people aren’t warriors anymore, but they’re already held on these legends, on these glories to the past, they live a life with no new ways and with no hope. The memories of their past are an evidence of their decadence in their present lives. This decadence is a consequence of the always thought to live the past.

“When we have finished quarrelling for crumbs
Under the table, or gnawing the bones
Of a dead culture, we will arise
And greet each other in a new dawn
Armed, but not in the old way.”

In the two first lines, the poet shows the situation of the present life of Welsh people: “quarrelling crumbs” and “gnawing the bones”. I think that these two expressions says that welsh people live only the past. About the future, the poet just criticizes this concern of welsh people remember their glorious past. Of course, some things in the welsh past, brought to their history positive effects. But, they are not totally admired for this. To they live a good future, they need to “greet each other in a new dawn”, they have to be “armed”, but armed to deal of new ways, to become “warriors” to fight for their wishes, “warriors” different from what they were in the past.

We were a people taut for war; the hills
Were no harder, the thin grass
Clothed them more warmly than the coarse
Shirts our small bones.
We fought, and were always in retreat,
Like snow thawing upon the slopes
Of Mynydd Mawr; and yet the stranger
Never found our ultimate stand
In the thick woods, declaiming verse
To the sharp prompting of the harp.
Our kings died, or they were slain
By the old treachery at the ford.
Our bards perished, driven from the halls
Of nobles by the thorn and bramble.
We were a people bred on legends,
Warming our hands at the red past.
The great were ashamed of our loose rags
Clinging stubbornly to the proud tree
Of blood and birth, our lean bellies
And mud houses were a proof
Of our ineptitude for life.
We were a people wasting ourselves
In fruitless battles for our masters,
In lands to which we had no claim,
With men for whom we felt no hatred.
We were a people, and are so yet.
When we have finished quarrelling for crumbs
Under the table, or gnawing the bones
Of a dead culture, we will arise
And greet each other in a new dawn
Armed, but not in the old way.

R. S. Thomas (1913 – 2000)